Katherine Jackson: Michael Jackson denied using prescription drugs

Jeff Gottlieb

Katherine Jackson testified Monday that her pop star son denied he was using prescription drugs when she asked him about rumors she had heard.

Testifying for the second day in her family's wrongful-death suit against entertainment giant AEG Live, the family matriarch said the conversation occurred as she was getting ready to leave her son's house in Las Vegas, where Michael Jackson lived from 2006 to 2008. She said she told Michael that she had heard he was using prescription drugs and that she didn't want him to end up "like all the others."

Speaking in a soft, muffled voice that was sometimes difficult to hear through the courtroom sound system, Katherine Jackson, when asked a question by AEG Live attorney Marvin Putnam, said her son sometimes didn’t remember things. Several times she told Putnam that she didn't want to answer a question.

Jackson and the pop star’s three children are suing AEG Live, arguing that the company is complicit in Michael Jackson’s 2009 death because it hired and supervised Conrad Murray, the Las Vegas physician who administered a fatal dose of a strong anesthetic as the singer prepared for his “This Is It” comeback tour. AEG contends it was Michael Jackson who hired Murray.

On the stand Monday, Katherine Jackson said she knew her son was using prescription pain pills for burns he suffered to his scalp during the filming of a Pepsi commercial and for a back injury and said that she figured he would deny any drug abuse because he didn't want her to worry.

"If a child goes out to play and does something real ugly, and a parent asks them about it, he’s gong to deny it,” she said.